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Continuous Testing: with Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript

by Ben Rady and Rod Coffin

The chart shows the approximate number of words in each chapter of Continuous Testing per week. The latest numbers are highlighted—mouse over prior weeks to see their figures.

Feedback. We’re always telling you that you need feedback, with a short feedback gap — the time it takes to get feedback on your decisions, your code, your designs. Well, what if you narrowed the feedback gap to near zero while coding? You’d have continuous testing, a powerful idea that lets you fix bugs while they’re still small and fresh.

Continuous Testing shows you how to use a combination of tests, tools, and techniques to immediately detect problems in code, before they spread.

Out of Print

This book is currently out of print.

About this Book

160 pages

Published: 2011-06-15

Release: P1.0 (2011-06-27)

ISBN: 978-1-93435-670-8

Now you can immediately detect problems in code—before it’s too late, and before problems spread. It isn’t magic, but a clever combination of tests, tools, and techniques that tells you right away when there’s a problem. Not minutes, hours or days from now, but right now, when it’s easiest to fix. Spend more of your time writing valuable software, and less time slogging through code line-by-line and second-guessing your decisions.

We’ll show you how to set up and run automated tests that check your work continuously as you write code. You’ll start with tools such as Autotest and Watchr and see how to use them effectively in a continuous environment.

You’ll discover the fundamentals of creating and maintaining a test suite that’s fast, informative, reliable, and exhaustive. You’ll use powerful techniques such as inline assertions—a much better alternative to debugging or console printing. See how Continuous Testing can improve the quality of your existing tests and ensure that the new tests you write will do the job.

You’ll start with examples in Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript, but you’ll learn general techniques you can apply to a wide range of languages and frameworks.

By giving you instant feedback about the quality of your code and the quality of your tests, continuous testing creates a visceral feedback loop that you can actually feel as you work. Get this book and start doing Continuous Testing: with Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript today.

About the Author

Ben Rady has helped both large and small organizations adopt more
effective technical practices and deliver better software. Currently a senior
software engineer at DRW Trading in Chicago, he is a frequent speaker at
conferences around the U.S. As an associate professor at Loyola University,
Ben is helping to mentor the next generation of great software developers.

Rod Coffin is a frequent speaker at software conferences and has written
many articles on a range of software development topics, including agility,
enterprise software development, and semantics.

Comments and Reviews

Continuous testing-automatically running unit tests on every source file change-is a radically simple idea. But it requires brain refactoring to use it effectively. That’s why you need this book. Writing good tests for Autotest and Watchr, extending them to fit your coding style, using them for nontesting activities, and dealing with debugging fallout;Rady and Coffin have “been there, done that.” They help you become an effective continuous tester from day one.

Nowadays many developers wonder how they ever wrote any code without automated tests and TDD/BDD. I suspect they will have a similar experience after reading this book: how did we ever build software systems without continuous feedback? Kudos to Ben and Rod for advancing the craft of software development by writing about, creating, and applying continuous testing tools and project-specific feedback loops.

—Paul HolserPrincipal ConsultantImproving Enterprises

This book has a lot of useful information that will help you make sure your tests are run as frequently as possible while wasting as little effort as possible on remembering to run them. I recommend this book to coworkers so they can incorporate the ideas into their daily work.

—Noel RappinSenior ConsultantObtiva, Inc.

This has to be one of the books with the highest valuable-content-to-page-count ratio that I have ever read. This is one of those books that makes you want to “run to your computer and try it out”—-you will love it!

—Fred DaoudAuthor, "Stripes...and Java Web Development is Fun Again" and "Getting Started with Apache Click"